Capt. William Calder, it disclosed, had volunteered for special operations from a position which was secret. She should not expect to hear from him for at least six months. She should not ask questions. She was respectfully requested to keep the fact he is on special assignment to herself and her immediate family. The captain was in good health and would be back in touch with her when circumstances allowed.
That was all. After the telegram, the few pushpins she’d used to mark Kip’s locations in Vietnam seemed sad and vain, and the map was transformed into worthless colored paper. His trail was no longer traceable. I don’t think it was a week before the map came down. Jessica, in a rare moment of crooking her thoughts, explained that for some reason she considered it bad luck to leave it up. Maybe so, maybe not. It wasn’t my place to agree or dispute. I didn’t miss it, though, nor did it occur to me to reciprocate by removing my monk from the door to my room.
Obviously she had not, in the end, gone overseas. Nor had I withdrawn from the apartment again. We persisted. Our lives as individuals and as mates (loaded word, but this is how we began to think of ourselves) began to deepen. How could they not? Jessica Rankin was pregnant, and I was her best friend. Morning sickness, maternity dresses (—Tents is more like it, she said, —tutu tents), what pediatrician and what hospital—these problems and questions we attended to as a team. She refused to rely on anyone but me and above all refused to let her parents in on the pregnancy until the last possible moment. Our world became circumscribed. We were alone with the glorious adversity of it all. We couldn’t and didn’t allow for any direct comment about what was going on between us, but our discrete intimacy—not to mention our discreet intimacy—we allowed to grow. It was treated like some plant in the garden that is not watered by the perverse gardener, but from a biological stubbornness of its own refuses to wilt and perish. Like a tenacious weed with a deepening taproot. And lots of succulent spiny leaves.
What stands out most about that summer is the heat. An Old Farmer’s Almanac would show just what the weather was truly like, measured by more objective instruments than myself. For all I know there may have been cool showers, unusual chilly nights and days. But I doubt it, because heat, ungodly heat, heat sweltering and heavy with humidity, is all I can conceive when remembering those months.
There was no flowering between us, just the unstated promise of responsibility between one friend and another. None of this was difficult, there was no work involved. We did not work on our relationship any more than we tried to discuss or define it—or, for that matter, any more than we called it a relationship. It became understood, in the purest sense became a tacit agreement, that I would help her through the pregnancy and the birth of the child. It was Jessica’s idea that if it turned out to be a boy, it would be named William, and mine that were it a girl, she’d be called Ariel.
I never asked why she changed her mind about going to find him, assuming that if she wanted to discuss it with me, she would, given Jessica’s penchant for discourse rather than strength through silence, but the morning after she had packed and I had slept so well, she went about her business as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place just eight or ten hours before. Her eyes were clouded and dark crescents impressed the skin beneath them; otherwise she seemed surreally self-possessed. Sometimes over the years, when I allowed myself thoughts about her slow arc away from Kip, I have wondered whether this wasn’t one of the crucial moments in his career of losing Jessica. She left for work—she’d taken a job at a halfway house for troubled children (they call them “at-risk children” now, shifting blame from the runaways and child-vagrants to the society that bred them)—and I indulged myself in a look around her room. The suitcase was back in the closet, as were her clothes. Nothing need be said. She had made her decision. Life went on despite the languorous heat and the silence from abroad.
That September I began my final year of law school.
The first time Kip flew over the Plaine des Jarres, back in his fledgling week as a Raven, so much came back to him from that other part of his life. There was a karst, a tower of limestone that rose from the lush flat, and this reminded him of the volcanic tuff cliffs and great tent rocks that stood like giants in canyons back home. There was an old French colonial road cutting straight as a horizontal plumb line through the bush that put him in mind of Route 502 leading from the Pajarito Plateau down across the unpopulous desert, across a similar beautiful if barren stretch from one place to another—the very road I traveled last night to get from Los Alamos to Chimayó. The Plain of Jars itself was much like the Valle Grande near Redondo Peak, the verdant flat valle caldera, an earthen pan, the remains of a collapsed volcano. Then there were famous and mysterious ancient stone jars, scattered everywhere, broken and overgrown with wild vegetation, which made him think of the equally mysterious ruins of the Anasazi, still charged with potency, and reminded him of the ruined cliffside houses in the dry valleys back in New Mexico, of the Tyuonyi circle with its ratlin of stones in Frijoles Canyon, pueblo fragments now fallen into disarray, but which once meant everything to the Indians who piled them into place. Laos, Kip could see at once, was another land of enchantment.
He and the pilot who was ferrying him to Long Tieng were not afraid. They would not have got to this place were they the kind to be afraid, or the kind who would admit to fear, either to themselves or any other.
They weren’t cleared to be up here. The area was reported to be thick with antiaircraft installations. Back in spring of 1964 the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese had launched attacks on the neutralist Laotian forces and installed antiaircraft guns in sixteen sites around the plain. Later the same year we would order a series of secret attacks on installations near Xieng Khouang, with results of a sort we hadn’t anticipated or desired—two planes down, a pilot captured, rescue efforts thwarted by heavy flak trap fire, and the whole fiasco brought to the attention of the media through reports from the New China news agency in Peking.
Nothing but trouble ensued. We weren’t supposed to be operating in Laos, neither were the North Vietnamese. Laos was neutral. Laotians were supposed to be here. Instead, everybody was here. It was like a big wink among us, like everyone signed the treaties with one hand, knowing that all other hands were hidden under the table, fingers crossed.
The Plaine des Jarres had proved to be hexed tract, and if it weren’t for the sudden escalation of bombing over North Vietnam, which drew the media’s concern away from Xieng Khouang and environs, they wouldn’t be flying—Kip and the other man—over these urns this morning. In the rush of events things are often lost and forgotten. Neglect settled over the violations and wreckage here once more, and Laos again became a part of the map less observed by the watchful back home.
Kip had remembered, though. He had heard about it back in Vientiane, maybe at the des Amis, maybe elsewhere. But he’d heard it was a sight to behold. He knew that the Plain of Jars was not only dangerous but off the course to Long Tieng by an hour or more. He thought he would ask anyway. It was as if he wanted to test the laxity and freedoms of waging war up in here. And the Air America man piloting the twin-engine Baron had said, —Why not? after Kip asked him if they could manage a pass over the valley. Mysterious strew of funerary urns. He had to see it. It seemed to him of ritual importance.
They flew low, often below the mountaintops, in and out of overcast, then the plain emerged dotted with the hollowed stones.
—Beautiful, Kip said.
Taciturn, Air America banked them away to the south. Nothing untoward had happened. Indeed, it was understood between them, without their having had to discuss it, that nothing had happened at all. They were not in Laos. They were not about to land in Long Tieng. They had not been over the Plaine des Jarres.
Long Tieng—or Long Chieng—means clear valley. However, that afternoon when they finally came in, fog hung in the fissures of the karsts, and they dropped down through patches of obscurant white. There was the one strip, one approach only
. They flew from the southeast toward northeast, buffeted lightly by some crabbing winds. Two karsts, of limestone and violet, drove into the clouds, like dark fins up into sea foam. Kip took note of the airspeed, the length of the runway, the landmarks.
Spook heaven they called this place. The twin karsts at the end of the landing strip were known as the titties. Long Tieng, referred to as Alternate, the heart of our quiet operation out of Laos, would come to be recognized as the most secret place on earth at the time. As at Los Alamos where men went by names other than their own—Enrico Fermi was known as Henry Farmer, Niels Bohr was Nicholas Baker, Segrè was Samson—here they assumed code names: Hog, Black Lion, Mr. Clean. In the same way that everyone on the Hill was simply called an engineer—the word physicist was not a part of speech—here, along with the discarding of uniforms, the usual hierarchies, formalities, niceties of military rank and behavior were eschewed. Everyone was simply a Raven, and that was that. Like Los Alamos, Long Tieng was nicknamed Shangri-la. Like Los Alamos, it was cradled by mountains and hastily built in order to win a war from an odd angle. Shangri-la, poor James Hilton, the memory of his Tibetan or was it Nepalese mountaintop Utopia was once more dragged through the muds of irony. Though Alternate perched in solitude and was powered by what was considered a worthy wartime cause, its conditions were less than paradisiacal. As with Los Alamos, Alternate was no Shangri-la.
None of this was lost on Kip. Los Alamos, the most secret place in the world when he was born. Long Tieng, Laos, the most secret place on earth during the Vietnam war, his war, now that he was a man.
The words had something eerie in common. What was it about them? Laos, Los Alamos. He wrote them with a marker on the back on his hand as the plane taxied to a stop. Los Alamos, Laos. And he saw it there, so perfectly apt. The word Laos was hidden twice inside the words Los Alamos. Islands in the sky. Laos, Los Alamos.
The place was a chaos of enterprise. Transports in and out carrying shipments of rice that were dropped into remote villages. Beautiful chubby T-28s with their engines that sounded like old gas-powered washing machines, everywhere Bird Dogs with their single prop and ironic fragility, helicopters rising and settling, and the ever-present Pilatus Porters with their buzzy turboprop engines. Alternate was a wall of sound (he would discover that at night it was just the opposite, totally serene, no movement, only the distant cry of a refugee baby awakening its mother). Kip drew his eyes down from the luminous dark green peaks that ringed Long Tieng. Again, Los Alamos, the Jemez mountains. And like the Hill, here people of such different backgrounds were tossed together into one grand ferment.
Movement, exuberant, greeted him on the ground. Boys chewed and smoked opium in the small open-air market, sold cucumbers and onions, blue eggs and small tomatoes. People lived in makeshift huts fashioned of petrol drums and torn parachutes, of wood, tin, and rice sacks. There were piglets and chickens, pet Himalayan black bears—two of them—in a cage; there were children playing in the shade of parked jeeps. Along the runway there were refugee shacks and hovels that constituted the saddest, most pitiful provisional borough anywhere on earth, with a populace driven here by the war, driven into what was nothing less than a political leprosarium. His heart broke as he walked along, his heart broke but it also beat to a memory of such a familiar rhythm.
What is this place? he thought. Who are these people? Familiars, so different and the same. Secrets, he thought, beget secrets, but also remind us of what we know too well.
On one side of the runway stood a pretty bouquetière dressed in jacket and grand hat trimmed with silver French coins that chimed when she moved. Men with stick crutches and armless waifs hung around on the other. He had expected this. The stories about this place he’d heard back in the capital lent it mythological glamour of a depraved cast. A forward staging area, a transient town of soldiers and refugees, of displaced mountain farmers and guerillas, another nonexistent mountain village in which Hmong, Kmhmu, and Lao blended—by an exigency of war—with faces of white attachés and advisors who, insofar as they did not exist, might as well have been benevolent ghosts.
A Hmong maquis aide-de-camp in white pajama pants and loose khaki jacket greeted him with a salute first, then with a whai, palms pressed together prayerlike before his grave face, both of which respects Kip returned. An American, his face bathed in shade thrown by a bush hat, noticed Kip and came up to introduce himself. The Hmong nodded to the other man and went his own way. It was clear that Kip had misunderstood in thinking the Hmong and this American had come out especially to greet him. They were each busy doing something else and happened to encounter him is all. It was an informal place, wild with activity. A helicopter rose off the runway, some supplies being airlifted out. Noise of engines was a constant in the days here. Dust lifted in whirlings.
The man asked, —New Raven?
—What? he leaned toward the man’s shoulder to be heard over the chopper.
—I said, New Raven?
Kip squinted, nodded.
—Raven hootch is back over here against the mountain.
—Thanks, said Kip, and hauled his light duffel over his left shoulder.
In the military, one who was involved in covert activities was known as a spook, and there were loose cadres of spooks working these regions—isolates and bushmasters who gave up dogtags and identities in favor of taking it to the enemy like a virus might, quietly as possible—and Kip, there on the airstrip, realized he too now was one of them, one of l’armée clandestine, a spook come to join these mountain people in fighting the Tchaw Gee, “eaters of gall bladders,” as the Hmong referred to the enemy. He was now an invisible man, a lethal specter.
And as he walked along past the orphans and the clan children giggling and running back and forth, chasing a dog with a stick, or a gourd that had been converted into a ball, he found himself thinking thoughts he had come a long way not to think. Maybe it was seeing the dog there that prompted him to recall the proverb, “The wolf is kept fed by his feet,” which meant that the wolf was always on the move, a migrant on the prowl for prey. That, it dawned on him, was what he was becoming.
This was as near the edge of the world as he could ever go. And still it might not be far enough. What did he finally care about the Viet Cong or the Viet Minh? This was not his war. Maybe it was just that which attracted him to it—that it wasn’t his, so that if he lost it, he lost something he hadn’t possessed in the first place? No, that seemed too much of a dance. He felt suddenly very sleepy. He who always found it difficult to sleep.
He’d been up for the better part of three days and nights, traveling from Vientiane to Luang Prabang—hitching rides with others who had their own peculiar agendas—and now to Long Tieng.
By morning the next day he was already on his first mission. Kip’s job was that of a forward air controller, an FAC, and though his work was not as wrapped in obvious glory as, say, that of a member of a fighter squadron, it was far more dangerous. A forward air controller was the avant courier, the scout. He did not himself kill, but engineered strikes. He would fly out over unknown terrain and make that territory known, mark it with smoke, call in assaults from the fighters stacked in the skies above. He carried no significant armaments, he flew in antiquated aircraft, not in formation, but low or high as he saw fit, tracing erratic patterns against the sky.
Kip was assigned a plane, a backseater, a flight time. The backseater told him where Vang Pao, the Hmong general who directed operations here, wanted them to go. And they went there, or else they went where he, Kip, thought they should go. His independence was almost consummate.
On that first flight, they found evidence of troop movement, and before Kip had so much as got his bearings he found himself laying down white phosphorous smoke rockets on a camouflaged encampment, having called in a flight of Phantoms and watched the flames bubble up off the edge of the jungled ravine. A fuel dump. Another pass over the blackened patch of double canopy revealed that the bad guys had been greased. If the
bombing hadn’t got them, the moisture-sensitive white phosphorus did. When you fired the rockets into the land below they would blossom like beautiful flowers, and the flowers would drift in the air, willowy and fragile and changing shape as they went. Then, if the flower found you, you’d be burned. Willy Pete—even chemicals had nicknames—turned to terrible poison the moment it came in contact with skin or was breathed into lungs. Moisture burns was what you got. Don’t be sweating and don’t tongue your lips. And for godsakes do not cry. You cry, you die. It was interesting, Kip thought, that napalm was what all the folks back home thought was the worst stuff we were using over here. Not that napalm wasn’t terrible. Jelly gasoline. Gets on your skin and you can roll around in the mud and throw yourself into the nearest river and the burning will not stop. But the phosphorus was even more devious, because the white phosphorus was a gas that could find you down in your subterranean hideout. There wasn’t much talk about Willy Pete rockets, but the Ravens would use them when the enemy had dug in too deep to bomb.
Some things went right, some went wrong. What else was new. The Hmong with whom they worked had radio equipment that was corroded, antique, unserviceable. You have a good radio and a bad radio and you may as well have two bad radios. It would have been more efficient to give the pilot a tin can, give the field command officer a tin can, string a wire between them, a very long and flexible wire indeed, and hope for the best. But they made it work. Cases of filet mignon from Central America were traded for watches; the finest prostitutes were not as valuable as a British Sten gun or a couple of working nine-millimeter pistols. This was barter, the most primitive capitalism, and this was what we were fighting to protect. War, Kip noted once more, brought out the best of the worst in people.
And then back to Long Tieng for a beer and sandwich in the hootch and to sleep.
The next day was essentially the same. Different part of the terrain was visited. Different individuals marked with the white smoke. Different route back home perhaps. But the same urchins along the walk from the strip back up the rise toward the quarters, the same characterless sleep. After a few weeks of this routine madness you’d fly down to Vientiane for rest and relaxation in the villa there. Eat, drink, find a girl.
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